John Osborne has been described as the most important young dramatist to waylay the British stage in the last life cycle of the locust. Sir Laurence Olivier is esteemed as one of the great, perhaps the greatest, English-speaking actors of our times. The appearance of Olivier in a play by Osborne, The Entertainer, cannot fail to be a major event of the current season.
The Entertainer is about Archie Rice, a middle-aged, mediocre song-and-dance man, dirty-joking his way to final failure. Involved with him are sturdy, self-respecting Billy Rice, his father, one of the music-hall greats of a better age; Phoebe Rice, Archie’s ineffectual and maudlin second wife; Jean Rice, his intelligent and rebellious daughter by his first marriage; and Frank Rice, Archie and Phoebe’s son. There is another son, Mick, who is off with the British Army in the Suez fiasco, and who is important in the plot though he does not appear. The scene is a dingy lodging house in an English coastal resort.
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